Flexible, and other unlikely compliments

Our van is my typical mode of transportation for very obvious reasons. Our previous van was a true gift from God (a story for another day), but was quite old. When we bought our current van last year, I noticed that the side mirrors had little icons to indicate if someone was in your blind spot. What an unnecessary, but genius feature. When I got the chance to drive my husbands car the other evening, I had to keep reminding myself that his car did not have that amenity. While his car also had blindspots, but it did not alert me to them the way my van did.

Sometimes there are areas of our lives that are in our blind spots. Things that we cannot see as clearly. As other people might, both the negative and the positive.

The other day, a friend called me flexible. She just said it very casually in conversation. She might not even remember that she said it, but my brain hit the brakes on that word. Flexible. I couldn’t get passed it.

Later in conversation, I mentioned to my husband that someone had called me flexible. I said it almost as a joke. “Can you believe it? Me, flexible?” I kept remarking how I thought she must have meant something different. Like when you cannot quite access the word you are looking for, so you use the closest word that comes to mind. A word that does not fit perfectly, but can relay a similar meaning.

“She probably did not mean flexible,” I said.  “Maybe she meant reserved or calm,” I guessed as I thought back on the situation that she was referring to.

My husband gently responded, “I do not think she would say it if she didn’t mean it. I’m sure she meant flexible.”

Never in my life had I been called flexible. Anyone that I grew up with would laugh at the idea, and I told him as much.

“Did you ever consider that the Holy Spirit is sanctifying you to be more flexible?” He asked.

Honestly, no. I had not thought about that possibility at all. Albeit, areas in which I had slowly been learning to stop fighting what I had no control over. Not every detail needed to be known anymore. When my extremely efficient plan got messed up, it no longer *always* sent me into a spiral.

But this didn’t feel like any sort of sanctification. At times, it just felt like I had given up. Had the feeling of defeat. I walked around with the subtle idea that total control was a characteristic of godliness. I had allowed myself to believe that it was the same as the spiritual gift of self control. (It was not.)

For so long everything needed to be as I expected it, because I assumed that my expectations were the best way. And the more it all kept falling apart, or the more I couldn’t plan for the unseen and unknown, the more I just gave up.

But maybe it was in fact surrender?

That is the beauty of sanctification. It is not by our might or our intention. It is only by the Spirit. Not by strength, but by surrender.

And the thing about surrender is that we give up control. We offer ourselves, we pray over our desires, and we obey. But we cannot control the outcome. The Bible says that anyone in Christ is being sanctified. But there is no mention of when or how or in what order that sanctification happens.

If I could give God a priority list, by controlling tendencies would not have been near the top. In many ways, I desired to be in control. The frustration did not come in the pursuit of control, but when control lay out of reach. And over the course of my life, God has increasingly walked me through situations in which I had no control.

And yet in His kindness, I have experienced (not perfectly, but increasingly) a surrender of control. And on the other side there is not chaos (like I had feared,) but freedom.

Growth can be hard to acknowledge because we want it to be our own doing. We want to be our power and our timing and our strategy and our effort. Or it doesn’t feel like it counts.

But that is thing… None of it will ever be in our strength. Which is the most freeing thing we can believe.

Admittedly, there are times now, when more spirit led structure would be useful. It would make sense that sanctification is equal parts tearing down of old ways and building up of new ones.

In Christ, the pursuit of holiness is a high and worthy calling, but take heart. Though we toil after many things, getting discouraged often when as Paul says “For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.”

As we work, pray, and strive for obedience and transformation, God is working out our faith and conforming us to His likeness in areas that we never expected. He is blessing us with growth in places we did not “put in the work”. How is that for grace?

So like a garden that is lovingly tended and strenuously worked, our attentiveness to the Lord will bear good fruit. But in a similar fashion, beautiful and abundant wildflowers pop in areas in which no one tended. Because the Lord produces beautiful things in our lives at His own discretion.